Supporters of Sony's console have probably played at least one of the Killzone games. While Killzone 2 and 3 were both brilliant games, developer Guerilla made a bit of a bumpy start to a great future warfare shooter series. The multiplayer can be good fun, but you might want to stay away from the single player. Here's why...

The Graphics

At a quick first glance, the graphics might not appear too shabby. The character models look very realistic, even almost life-like. Also, I quite enjoy the game's scenery every now and then. The levels are filled with rubble on the ground and dust in the air... Just as you would expect from any war-torn area. So the level of detail is nothing to complain about. However, there are obviously many flaws within Killzone. NPC's facial textures often change from high detail to low detail, the frame rate is very unstable, and some objects which are supposed to be solid are completely immaterial. Ever wanted to run through a wall? Well, Killzone lets you do it!

The Sound

One of the game's highlights, Killzone boasts an impressive original soundtrack. Only thing is, the sound team didn't really know when exactly to play what music. Watching a cutscene is like watching a dramatic musical; the music unnecessarily loudens during a passing of words between certain characters, and there's always a choir to be heard somewhere behind the more loud notes. But all in all, I like the game's soundtrack, even if it's often played at the most unnecessary moments possible. No, the real troublemaker is the in-game's muffled voice work. Killzone is a very talkative game, it is rare to have a moment of silence in which no one is speaking. And the amount of which the voices are muffled is astonishing... It's almost PS1 level voice work. Shame, because the voice work of your main squad are solid in general.

The Addictiveness

I wouldn't play the single player again. There's just not much in there to keep you entertained. However, the multiplayer might just make for very good fun between you and your friends. The standard Deathmatch and Team Deathmatch are a little generic, but that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing. Then you have Domination, a Capture The Base-inspired game, there's a mode called Assault, in which a team needs to destroy an object of another team, etc. etc. There are quite a few multiplayer modes (even though not a lot of them feel very different from each other) which are all just simple fun to play with others. But the single player? Not a fan.

The Story

What shall I say... It's sort of one-of-a-kind for a shooter. Humanity began to colonize space, and found the planet Helghan to be a habitable planet. But it turned out the people who inhabited that planet where intoxicated by the planet's atmosphere, forming a new 'race' of people, called the Helghast. Apparently, they are quite aggressive, and they invade other planets. One day, they attacked Vekta, your home planet. You start the game as Capt. Jan Templar, but as you proceed, you unlock three more characters. Their background is revealed as you advance through the game through cutscenes. The plot is one of the various attempts of Killzone at being unique, and honestly, I think it worked. A little. The ending is a bit... disappointing, but I won't spoil it.

The Depth

A little hit-and-miss here and there. Killzone is an amitious shooter, trying a lot of new things to make itself stand apart from the rest. In the single player you can play with four different characters, three of which have to be unlocked. While not all are as fun to play with as the other, they do make for some variety in the otherwise bland campaign. The first one is Templar, the average guy who's decent in just about everything, the other one is Luger, the silent and deadly assassin, the other is Rico, the hot-head with the machine gun, and the last is Hakha, a spy who really should wear a hat or something so you won't mistake him for the enemy. I'm impressed with the number of multiplayer game modes there are available, too, and the maps on which you play are quite big and varied. The game also features a rather unique sniper scope vision which looks really cool when you watch someone else play the game. Unfortunately, when you try it out yourself, you're likely to switch to another weapon instead. Controlling the zoom level is impossible once you've let go of the 'zoom' button, the sensitive scope flies all over the screen with the slightest jolt on the right stick, and it's hard to make out your target to begin with... That thing is not fun to play around with.

The Difficulty

Even if Killzone's camera controls are a little wonky, making aiming a little tricky sometimes, the dumb-as-a-brick AI more than makes up for it. The baddies often stay in wide-open space for you to shoot them in the butt, they sometimes can't see they're walking against walls when trying to take cover, and there really aren't any bosses or anything like that. The single player mainly focuses on you blasting through hordes and hordes of Helghast, while progressing towards of the end of the level (which gets quite repetitive after a while, really). In the fourth or so level, you get introduced to a slightly tougher baddie, but they don't really ask for a specific strategy to be taken down with, sadly.

Yikes, a 5.8 out of 10. Well, as a rounded figure, that would make an 6, saying Killzone is by no means a bad game. It's just nowhere near as good as it could've been. Busted animation, muffled in-game sound and a lot of stuff that just didn't work out well really stop Killzone from being a grand futuristic war shooter. The split-screen multiplayer is good fun, though. My friends and I spent hours on it. Stay for the multiplayer, stay away from the single player.

pros:

• Split-screen multiplayer can be good fun

cons:

• A ton of visual bugs and frame rate issues

• The game's contrast is too dark, and can't be adjusted

• Very muffled in-game sound

• Killzone tried to build in unique gameplay aspects; but they didn't really work